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In the South Seas

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> In the South Seas




On the afternoon before it was intended we should sail, a
valedictory party came on board: nine of our particular friends
equipped with gifts and dressed as for a festival. Hoka, the chief
dancer and singer, the greatest dandy of Anaho, and one of the
handsomest young fellows in the world-sullen, showy, dramatic,
light as a feather and strong as an ox--it would have been hard, on
that occasion, to recognise, as he sat there stooped and silent,
his face heavy and grey. It was strange to see the lad so much
affected; stranger still to recognise in his last gift one of the
curios we had refused on the first day, and to know our friend, so
gaily dressed, so plainly moved at our departure, for one of the
half-naked crew that had besieged and insulted us on our arrival:
strangest of all, perhaps, to find, in that carved handle of a fan,
the last of those curiosities of the first day which had now all
been given to us by their possessors--their chief merchandise, for
which they had sought to ransom us as long as we were strangers,
which they pressed on us for nothing as soon as we were friends.
The last visit was not long protracted. One after another they
shook hands and got down into their canoe; when Hoka turned his
back immediately upon the ship, so that we saw his face no more.
Taipi, on the other hand, remained standing and facing us with
gracious valedictory gestures; and when Captain Otis dipped the
ensign, the whole party saluted with their hats. This was the
farewell; the episode of our visit to Anaho was held concluded; and
though the Casco remained nearly forty hours at her moorings, not
one returned on board, and I am inclined to think they avoided
appearing on the beach. This reserve and dignity is the finest
trait of the Marquesan.



CHAPTER III--THE MAROON



Of the beauties of Anaho books might be written. I remember waking
about three, to find the air temperate and scented. The long swell
brimmed into the bay, and seemed to fill it full and then subside.
Gently, deeply, and silently the Casco rolled; only at times a
block piped like a bird. Oceanward, the heaven was bright with
stars and the sea with their reflections. If I looked to that
side, I might have sung with the Hawaiian poet:


Ua maomao ka lani, ua kahaea luna,
Ua pipi ka maka o ka hoku.
(The heavens were fair, they stretched above,
Many were the eyes of the stars.)


And then I turned shoreward, and high squalls were overhead; the
mountains loomed up black; and I could have fancied I had slipped
ten thousand miles away and was anchored in a Highland loch; that
when the day came, it would show pine, and heather, and green fern,
and roofs of turf sending up the smoke of peats; and the alien
speech that should next greet my ears must be Gaelic, not Kanaka.

And day, when it came, brought other sights and thoughts. I have
watched the morning break in many quarters of the world; it has
been certainly one of the chief joys of my existence, and the dawn
that I saw with most emotion shone upon the bay of Anaho. The
mountains abruptly overhang the port with every variety of surface
and of inclination, lawn, and cliff, and forest. Not one of these
but wore its proper tint of saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and
of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter
hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom
appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the ordinary light
of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels,
pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the
hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red
coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the
awakening business of the day; along the beach men and women, lads
and lasses, were returning from the bath in bright raiment, red and
blue and green, such as we delighted to see in the coloured little
pictures of our childhood; and presently the sun had cleared the
eastern hill, and the glow of the day was over all.

The glow continued and increased, the business, from the main part,
ceased before it had begun. Twice in the day there was a certain
stir of shepherding along the seaward hills. At times a canoe went
out to fish. At times a woman or two languidly filled a basket in
the cotton patch. At times a pipe would sound out of the shadow of
a house, ringing the changes on its three notes, with an effect
like Que le jour me dure, repeated endlessly. Or at times, across
a corner of the bay, two natives might communicate in the Marquesan
manner with conventional whistlings. All else was sleep and
silence. The surf broke and shone around the shores; a species of
black crane fished in the broken water; the black pigs were
continually galloping by on some affair; but the people might never
have awaked, or they might all be dead.

My favourite haunt was opposite the hamlet, where was a landing in
a cove under a lianaed cliff. The beach was lined with palms and a
tree called the purao, something between the fig and mulberry in
growth, and bearing a flower like a great yellow poppy with a
maroon heart. In places rocks encroached upon the sand; the beach
would be all submerged; and the surf would bubble warmly as high as
to my knees, and play with cocoa-nut husks as our more homely ocean
plays with wreck and wrack and bottles. As the reflux drew down,
marvels of colour and design streamed between my feet; which I
would grasp at, miss, or seize: now to find them what they
promised, shells to grace a cabinet or be set in gold upon a lady's
finger; now to catch only maya of coloured sand, pounded fragments
and pebbles, that, as soon as they were dry, became as dull and
homely as the flints upon a garden path. I have toiled at this
childish pleasure for hours in the strong sun, conscious of my
incurable ignorance; but too keenly pleased to be ashamed.
Meanwhile, the blackbird (or his tropical understudy) would be
fluting in the thickets overhead.

A little further, in the turn of the bay, a streamlet trickled in
the bottom of a den, thence spilling down a stair of rock into the
sea. The draught of air drew down under the foliage in the very
bottom of the den, which was a perfect arbour for coolness. In
front it stood open on the blue bay and the Casco lying there under
her awning and her cheerful colours. Overhead was a thatch of
puraos, and over these again palms brandished their bright fans, as
I have seen a conjurer make himself a halo out of naked swords.
For in this spot, over a neck of low land at the foot of the
mountains, the trade-wind streams into Anaho Bay in a flood of
almost constant volume and velocity, and of a heavenly coolness.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove, with Mrs.
Stevenson and the ship's cook. Except for the Casco lying outside,
and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the
world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-
still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On
a sudden, the trade-wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck
and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in
two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and
watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment
the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human
presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed
ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the
thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised,
struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the
cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot
on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the
rocks, it was amusing to observe that man's alacrity; death, he was
persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year
later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself.
The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law;
and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless
more troubled than ourselves.

At the top of the den there dwelt an old, melancholy, grizzled man
of the name of Tari (Charlie) Coffin. He was a native of Oahu, in
the Sandwich Islands; and had gone to sea in his youth in the
American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his
English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent
life. For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to
Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive
for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were
thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New
Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life
must have hung in the beginning by a hair. In the grief and terror
of that time, it is not unlikely he went mad, an infirmity to which
he was still liable; or perhaps a child may have taken a fancy to
him and ordained him to be spared. He escaped at least alive,
married in the island, and when I knew him was a widower with a
married son and a granddaughter. But the thought of Oahu haunted
him; its praise was for ever on his lips; he beheld it, looking
back, as a place of ceaseless feasting, song, and dance; and in his
dreams I daresay he revisits it with joy. I wonder what he would
think if he could be carried there indeed, and see the modern town
of Honolulu brisk with traffic, and the palace with its guards, and
the great hotel, and Mr. Berger's band with their uniforms and
outlandish instruments; or what he would think to see the brown
faces grown so few and the white so many; and his father's land
sold, for planting sugar, and his father's house quite perished, or
perhaps the last of them struck leprous and immured between the
surf and the cliffs on Molokai? So simply, even in South Sea
Islands, and so sadly, the changes come.

Tari was poor, and poorly lodged. His house was a wooden frame,
run up by Europeans; it was indeed his official residence, for Tari
was the shepherd of the promontory sheep. I can give a perfect
inventory of its contents: three kegs, a tin biscuit-box, an iron
saucepan, several cocoa-shell cups, a lantern, and three bottles,
probably containing oil; while the clothes of the family and a few
mats were thrown across the open rafters. Upon my first meeting
with this exile he had conceived for me one of the baseless island
friendships, had given me nuts to drink, and carried me up the den
'to see my house'--the only entertainment that he had to offer. He
liked the 'Amelican,' he said, and the 'Inglisman,' but the
'Flessman' was his abhorrence; and he was careful to explain that
if he had thought us 'Fless,' we should have had none of his nuts,
and never a sight of his house. His distaste for the French I can
partly understand, but not at all his toleration of the Anglo-
Saxon. The next day he brought me a pig, and some days later one
of our party going ashore found him in act to bring a second. We
were still strange to the islands; we were pained by the poor man's
generosity, which he could ill afford, and, by a natural enough but
quite unpardonable blunder, we refused the pig. Had Tari been a
Marquesan we should have seen him no more; being what he was, the
most mild, long-suffering, melancholy man, he took a revenge a
hundred times more painful. Scarce had the canoe with the nine
villagers put off from their farewell before the Casco was boarded
from the other side. It was Tari; coming thus late because he had
no canoe of his own, and had found it hard to borrow one; coming
thus solitary (as indeed we always saw him), because he was a
stranger in the land, and the dreariest of company. The rest of my
family basely fled from the encounter. I must receive our injured
friend alone; and the interview must have lasted hard upon an hour,
for he was loath to tear himself away. 'You go 'way. I see you no
more--no, sir!' he lamented; and then looking about him with rueful
admiration, 'This goodee ship--no, sir!--goodee ship!' he would
exclaim: the 'no, sir,' thrown out sharply through the nose upon a
rising inflection, an echo from New Bedford and the fallacious
whaler. From these expressions of grief and praise, he would
return continually to the case of the rejected pig. 'I like give
present all 'e same you,' he complained; 'only got pig: you no
take him!' He was a poor man; he had no choice of gifts; he had
only a pig, he repeated; and I had refused it. I have rarely been
more wretched than to see him sitting there, so old, so grey, so
poor, so hardly fortuned, of so rueful a countenance, and to
appreciate, with growing keenness, the affront which I had so
innocently dealt him; but it was one of those cases in which speech
is vain.

Tari's son was smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of
sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most
Anaho women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a
mite of a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when
Tari was from home, and found the son making a cotton sack, and
madame suckling mademoiselle. When I had sat down with them on the
floor, the girl began to question me about England; which I tried
to describe, piling the pan and the cocoa shells one upon another
to represent the houses, and explaining, as best I was able, and by
word and gesture, the over-population, the hunger, and the
perpetual toil. 'Pas de cocotiers? pas do popoi?' she asked. I
told her it was too cold, and went through an elaborate
performance, shutting out draughts, and crouching over an imaginary
fire, to make sure she understood. But she understood right well;
remarked it must be bad for the health, and sat a while gravely
reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows. I am sure it
roused her pity, for it struck in her another thought always
uppermost in the Marquesan bosom; and she began with a smiling
sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the
decease of her own people. 'Ici pas de Kanaques,' said she; and
taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both
her hands. 'Tenez--a little baby like this; then dead. All the
Kanaques die. Then no more.' The smile, and this instancing by
the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me
strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair. Meanwhile the
husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled
to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship's offering, which I had
just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw
their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day
already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more
of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary
works and no more readers.



CHAPTER IV--DEATH



The thought of death, I have said, is uppermost in the mind of the
Marquesan. It would be strange if it were otherwise. The race is
perhaps the handsomest extant. Six feet is about the middle height
of males; they are strongly muscled, free from fat, swift in
action, graceful in repose; and the women, though fatter and
duller, are still comely animals. To judge by the eye, there is no
race more viable; and yet death reaps them with both hands. When
Bishop Dordillon first came to Tai-o-hae, he reckoned the
inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the
same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual
natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman
Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but
two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both
Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the
christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must
have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He shall be able
to tell,' 'He shall be able to charm,' said the friendly
godmothers; 'But he shall not be able to hear,' exclaimed the last.
The tribe of Hapaa is said to have numbered some four hundred, when
the small-pox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months
later a woman developed tubercular consumption; the disease spread
like a fire about the valley, and in less than a year two
survivors, a man and a woman, fled from that new-created solitude.
A similar Adam and Eve may some day wither among new races, the
tragic residue of Britain. When I first heard this story the date
staggered me; but I am now inclined to think it possible. Early in
the year of my visit, for example, or late the year before, a first
case of phthisis appeared in a household of seventeen persons, and
by the month of August, when the tale was told me, one soul
survived, and that was a boy who had been absent at his schooling.
And depopulation works both ways, the doors of death being set wide
open, and the door of birth almost closed. Thus, in the half-year
ending July 1888 there were twelve deaths and but one birth in the
district of the Hatiheu. Seven or eight more deaths were to be
looked for in the ordinary course; and M. Aussel, the observant
gendarme, knew of but one likely birth. At this rate it is no
matter of surprise if the population in that part should have
declined in forty years from six thousand to less than four
hundred; which are, once more on the authority of M. Aussel, the
estimated figures. And the rate of decline must have even
accelerated towards the end.

A good way to appreciate the depopulation is to go by land from
Anaho to Hatiheu on the adjacent bay. The road is good travelling,
but cruelly steep. We seemed scarce to have passed the deserted
house which stands highest in Anaho before we were looking dizzily
down upon its roof; the Casco well out in the bay, and rolling for
a wager, shrank visibly; and presently through the gap of Tari's
isthmus, Ua-huna was seen to hang cloudlike on the horizon. Over
the summit, where the wind blew really chill, and whistled in the
reed-like grass, and tossed the grassy fell of the pandanus, we
stepped suddenly, as through a door, into the next vale and bay of
Hatiheu. A bowl of mountains encloses it upon three sides. On the
fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to
seaward in imminent and shattered crags, and presents the one
practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior of this vessel is
crowded with lovely and valuable trees,--orange, breadfruit, mummy-
apple, cocoa, the island chestnut, and for weeds, the pine and the
banana. Four perennial streams water and keep it green; and along
the dell, first of one, then of another, of these, the road, for a
considerable distance, descends into this fortunate valley. The
song of the waters and the familiar disarray of boulders gave us a
strong sense of home, which the exotic foliage, the daft-like
growth of the pandanus, the buttressed trunk of the banyan, the
black pigs galloping in the bush, and the architecture of the
native houses dissipated ere it could be enjoyed.

The houses on the Hatiheu side begin high up; higher yet, the more
melancholy spectacle of empty paepaes. When a native habitation is
deserted, the superstructure--pandanus thatch, wattle, unstable
tropical timber--speedily rots, and is speedily scattered by the
wind. Only the stones of the terrace endure; nor can any ruin,
cairn, or standing stone, or vitrified fort present a more stern
appearance of antiquity. We must have passed from six to eight of
these now houseless platforms. On the main road of the island,
where it crosses the valley of Taipi, Mr. Osbourne tells me they
are to be reckoned by the dozen; and as the roads have been made
long posterior to their erection, perhaps to their desertion, and
must simply be regarded as lines drawn at random through the bush,
the forest on either hand must be equally filled with these
survivals: the gravestones of whole families. Such ruins are tapu
in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have
become outposts of the kingdom of the grave. It might appear a
natural and pious custom in the hundreds who are left, the
rearguard of perished thousands, that their feet should leave
untrod these hearthstones of their fathers. I believe, in fact,
the custom rests on different and more grim conceptions. But the
house, the grave, and even the body of the dead, have been always
particularly honoured by Marquesans. Until recently the corpse was
sometimes kept in the family and daily oiled and sunned, until, by
gradual and revolting stages, it dried into a kind of mummy.
Offerings are still laid upon the grave. In Traitor's Bay, Mr.
Osbourne saw a man buy a looking-glass to lay upon his son's. And
the sentiment against the desecration of tombs, thoughtlessly
ruffled in the laying down of the new roads, is a chief ingredient
in the native hatred for the French.

The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his
race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises
with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of
mortality awful to support; and he is so inured to the apprehension
that he greets the reality with relief. He does not even seek to
support a disappointment; at an affront, at a breach of one of his
fleeting and communistic love-affairs, he seeks an instant refuge
in the grave. Hanging is now the fashion. I heard of three who
had hanged themselves in the west end of Hiva-oa during the first
half of 1888; but though this be a common form of suicide in other
parts of the South Seas, I cannot think it will continue popular in
the Marquesas. Far more suitable to Marquesan sentiment is the old
form of poisoning with the fruit of the eva, which offers to the
native suicide a cruel but deliberate death, and gives time for
those decencies of the last hour, to which he attaches such
remarkable importance. The coffin can thus be at hand, the pigs
killed, the cry of the mourners sounding already through the house;
and then it is, and not before, that the Marquesan is conscious of
achievement, his life all rounded in, his robes (like Caesar's)
adjusted for the final act. Praise not any man till he is dead,
said the ancients; envy not any man till you hear the mourners,
might be the Marquesan parody. The coffin, though of late
introduction, strangely engages their attention. It is to the
mature Marquesan what a watch is to the European schoolboy. For
ten years Queen Vaekehu had dunned the fathers; at last, but the
other day, they let her have her will, gave her her coffin, and the
woman's soul is at rest. I was told a droll instance of the force
of this preoccupation. The Polynesians are subject to a disease
seemingly rather of the will than of the body. I was told the
Tahitians have a word for it, erimatua, but cannot find it in my
dictionary. A gendarme, M. Nouveau, has seen men beginning to
succumb to this insubstantial malady, has routed them from their
houses, turned them on to do their trick upon the roads, and in two
days has seen them cured. But this other remedy is more original:
a Marquesan, dying of this discouragement--perhaps I should rather
say this acquiescence--has been known, at the fulfilment of his
crowning wish, on the mere sight of that desired hermitage, his
coffin--to revive, recover, shake off the hand of death, and be
restored for years to his occupations--carving tikis (idols), let
us say, or braiding old men's beards. From all this it may be
conceived how easily they meet death when it approaches naturally.
I heard one example, grim and picturesque. In the time of the
small-pox in Hapaa, an old man was seized with the disease; he had
no thought of recovery; had his grave dug by a wayside, and lived
in it for near a fortnight, eating, drinking, and smoking with the
passers-by, talking mostly of his end, and equally unconcerned for
himself and careless of the friends whom he infected.

This proneness to suicide, and loose seat in life, is not peculiar
to the Marquesan. What is peculiar is the widespread depression
and acceptance of the national end. Pleasures are neglected, the
dance languishes, the songs are forgotten. It is true that some,
and perhaps too many, of them are proscribed; but many remain, if
there were spirit to support or to revive them. At the last feast
of the Bastille, Stanislao Moanatini shed tears when he beheld the
inanimate performance of the dancers. When the people sang for us
in Anaho, they must apologise for the smallness of their repertory.
They were only young folk present, they said, and it was only the
old that knew the songs. The whole body of Marquesan poetry and
music was being suffered to die out with a single dispirited
generation. The full import is apparent only to one acquainted
with other Polynesian races; who knows how the Samoan coins a fresh
song for every trifling incident, or who has heard (on Penrhyn, for
instance) a band of little stripling maids from eight to twelve
keep up their minstrelsy for hours upon a stretch, one song
following another without pause. In like manner, the Marquesan,
never industrious, begins now to cease altogether from production.
The exports of the group decline out of all proportion even with
the death-rate of the islanders. 'The coral waxes, the palm grows,
and man departs,' says the Marquesan; and he folds his hands. And
surely this is nature. Fond as it may appear, we labour and
refrain, not for the rewards of any single life, but with a timid
eye upon the lives and memories of our successors; and where no one
is to succeed, of his own family, or his own tongue, I doubt
whether Rothschilds would make money or Cato practise virtue. It
is natural, also, that a temporary stimulus should sometimes rouse
the Marquesan from his lethargy. Over all the landward shore of
Anaho cotton runs like a wild weed; man or woman, whoever comes to
pick it, may earn a dollar in the day; yet when we arrived, the
trader's store-house was entirely empty; and before we left it was
near full. So long as the circus was there, so long as the Casco
was yet anchored in the bay, it behoved every one to make his
visit; and to this end every woman must have a new dress, and every
man a shirt and trousers. Never before, in Mr. Regler's
experience, had they displayed so much activity.

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